rankindex {vegan} | R Documentation |
Rank correlations between dissimilarity indices and gradient separation.
rankindex(grad, veg, indices = c("euc", "man", "gow", "bra", "kul"), stepacross = FALSE, method = "spearman", ...)
grad |
The gradient variable or matrix. |
veg |
The community data matrix. |
indices |
Dissimilarity indices compared, partial matches to
alternatives in vegdist . |
stepacross |
Use stepacross to find
a shorter path dissimilarity. The dissimilarities for site pairs
with no shared species are set NA using
no.shared so that indices with no fixed
upper limit can also be analysed. |
method |
Correlation method used. |
... |
Other parameters to stepacross . |
A good dissimilarity index for multidimensional scaling
should have a high rank-order similarity with gradient separation.
The function compares most indices in vegdist
against
gradient separation using rank correlation coefficients in
cor.test
. The gradient separation between each
point is assessed as Euclidean distance for continuous variables, and
as Gower metric for mixed data using function
daisy
when grad
has factors.
Returns a named vector of rank correlations.
There are several problems in using rank correlation coefficients.
Typically there are very many ties when n(n-1)/2 gradient
separation values are derived from just n observations.
Due to floating point arithmetics, many tied values differ by
machine epsilon and are arbitrarily ranked differently by
rank
used in cor.test
. Two indices
which are identical with certain
transformation or standardization may differ slightly
(magnitude 10^{-15}) and this may lead into third or fourth decimal
instability in rank correlations. Small differences in rank
correlations should not be taken too seriously. Probably this method
should be replaced with a sounder method, but I do not yet know
which... You may experiment with mantel
,
anosim
or even protest
.
Earlier version of this function used method = "kendall"
, but
that is far too slow in large data sets.
Jari Oksanen
Faith, F.P., Minchin, P.R. and Belbin, L. (1987). Compositional dissimilarity as a robust measure of ecological distance. Vegetatio 69, 57-68.
vegdist
, stepacross
,
no.shared
, isoMDS
,
cor
, Machine
, and for
alternatives anosim
, mantel
and
protest
.
data(varespec) data(varechem) ## The next scales all environmental variables to unit variance. ## Some would use PCA transformation. rankindex(scale(varechem), varespec) rankindex(scale(varechem), wisconsin(varespec))